Shortly after taking office, the new White House staff and President Obama were shocked at the state of information technology for the executive branch of the government. President Obama himself struggled with the idea of giving up his Blackberry and pushed the Secret Service and other IT staff to find a way to allow him to be safe, secure, and informed with the latest technologies. But the President didn’t stop at his Blackberry.
One of the President’s very first actions was to appoint a new position to the White House staff, the first Federal Chief Information Officer (CIO). He appointed the District of Columbia’s chief technology officer, Vivek Kundra, to fill the position, in hopes that having an overseeing position will allow the government to have more control over the $80 billion spent each year on Information Technology. Before becoming the CTO at the District of Columbia, Kundra was the assistant secretary of commerce and technology for the commonwealth of Virginia. These previous positions, his experience around Washington, and his knowledge of the need for increased IT solutions and governance made him a perfect fit for President Obama’s new position.
The CIO didn’t take long before instituting a number of Information Technology Governance procedures and strategies to help shape the direction of the IT spending across the government. This is clearly visible by the announcement of initiatives around information sharing, such as data.gov, apps.gov, and the IT Dashboard sites that have been modernized and made available to the public for their use. One of the main focuses of all of the initial actions by the Federal CIO is to govern the IT spending, shape the direction of the IT improvement, and insure that costs are reduced by implementing modern solutions. It will be interesting to see how well each of the branches of the government and their departments follow the lead and play nicely with the White House and the Federal CIO.
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The other day I received the following question on my post titled “Data Governance Policy”:
What do you see as the major difference between the following Policies:
1) Record Management, Retention, and Destruction policy
2) Data Governance Policy
Assuming that all data assets are recorded as records
I had never really thought of Data Governance and a Record Management, Retention, and Destruction Policy as being even remotely related, however, the more I think about it the more I see at least a few commonalities. So, I decided to chart out below some of the similarities and some of the differences. I think doing this will help give the gentlemen who asked the question, as well as others with the same question, a good understanding of how these two areas are similar and different.
Similarities
- Both Data Governance and Records Management deal with critical assets to the organization.
- Both must take absolute care to ensure that issues involving the data/documents they are managing are remedied quickly and escalated to management when necessary.
- Both focus on creating policies that should be followed by the enterprise. In DG, the policies generally refer to the quality of the data, whereas in RM the policies generally refer to practices of storing and disposing of data and information.
- Both assign responsibilities and authorities to other’s in the enterprise to take ownership of a set of documents, data, or information. Once someone is given authority and responsibility, the Program Manager of RM or DG will then hold that person accountable for their actions as they relate to their ownership.
- Both work to integrate the policies and procedures into business systems, workflows, and processes.
Differences
- Records Management does not necessarily involve a ‘council’ who meets regularly on critical issues affecting the enterprise; Data Governance does exactly that.
- Records Management often deals with tangible objects and documents. Data Governance generally deals with data as stored on a computer system.
- Data Governance has a very high focus on reviewing the data and ensuring there are rules, processes, and procedures to ensure the quality of the data is high. Records Management primarily focuses on the retention of the records until they are destroyed.
- Records Management generally focuses on when data becomes obsolete and when it can be destroyed. Rarely is this ever a topic of discussion for Data Governance.
- Data Governance has a high visibility across the enterprise (or it should) as long as the program is running. Generally Records Management as viewed as more operational, and as such, the visibility only comes when there are problems or critical issues arise.
